So I just want to start off this Blog with a sad note. My Grandad sadly passed away on the 7th of December after fighting cancer for more than two years. The past few months hes was in a lot of pain and was not able to enjoy life anymore. So on one hand I am happy he has been relieved from his suffering but on the otherhand it is sad that he was taken from our lives. He surppassed all the doctors predictions of how long he is going to live which just showed his determined and fighting personallity. Its difficult for me due to me being here in Africa and not with my family in this time, however my thoughts are with them. Mz Granddad was a reason why I started a blog about my experiences. Talking to him, he was always eagerly waiting for me to upload a new post entry that he could read and there were times where he would read the same blogpost repetively as he was eager to know what my experiences here in Africa are. He will alwazs stay in my heart and thoughts.
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| Me getting ready to watch surgeries |
Now going on to the event of the past week. This week I spent most of the week in the town, no its not a city (only learnt about it this week), in Karonga. I wanted to first handedly experience a malawian hospital. I wanted to see how a hospital is run here and how patients are treated and diagnosis are determined.
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| Karonga |
I thoroughly enjoyed the four days I spent at the hospital. I spent Monday and Tuesday in the Pediatric Ward, following a clinical officer doing his duties. A clinical officer is a health professional here in Malawi which is between a Doctor and a nurse. They study for three years to be a health worker and are able to do minor surgeries. Wednesday, I spent my time in the male Ward following the clinical officers there and the Thursday I was able to experience surgeries. So in total, I was able to see a wide range of departments and treatments at the hospital. One aspect that straight away noticed which was a problem was the fact that there is a lack of medication and facilities for the health workers to do their job. I am used to the austrian and German health system where they have nearly every medication ready to use and have good equipment to assist the health workers, so for me it was a bit of a shock to see how the malawian hospital is run. An example was snake bites. Here in Malawi, there are a lot of dangerous snakes, which if zou get biten and the venom enters your body, can kill you. I know that the health centre would not have any antivenom present, but I thought that at least a District Hospital would have it. Sadly, seeing three patients who were biten by snakes, i was told that only the hospitals in the capital Lilongwe and in Blantyre would have anitvenom. Well it did not mean that the patients here die, but they are given a different mixture which seems to work. How exactly they do it, not very sure. In my days at the hospital, I was also able to see how understaffed they are. In a ward for example, there are around 30 patients which are cared for by two nurses. This means these nurses cannot really help everyone very well. If it was not for the nursing students there at the time, they would be all alone. This made it difficult for every nurse to give each patient as much time and consideration some of them might have needed. Instead guardians would take over the role, meaning cleaning, feeding, and if ever one of the patients was feeling worse, they would get the nurses. Another area which they lacked in is facilities. For example, I witnessed a patient who was unconcious for a whole week and sadly he passed away during my time there. Normally, if Karonga Hospital is not able to treat the patient because the sickeness or injury the patient had is to severe and complicated, they would transfer him to Mzuzu, because they are better equiped, however, this patient would have needed to have gone to Mzuzu, but because of the instable condition, they could not risk it as it would take nearly 4 hours to get there. So anyway, because he was unconcious and they did not have good scanning machines, only X-ray and Ultrasound, they were not able to identify what exactly was wrong with him. He could not be given help with breathing as they had no working machine in the ward present. It was very sad to see because the health workers were very determined to find out how to try and improve his condition. They just face the problem that their hard work cannot save as much lives as they do not have the correct facilities to determine the correct diagnosis.
One aspect that I found very interesting, talking to a health worker, he told me that he sees that there is a huge dependency on foreign aid in terms of materials and medication. He said that he does not want to see the day when this aid is going to be stopped as he thinks the whole health care system will fail. He told me that he sees a problem with the government as he said corruption is to big and lots of money is being "lost" meaning that there is not enough materials and medication at hospitals to help the people to the best way possible. I thought it was very interesting to hear his opinion as it showed how difficult the health workers are finding it to work well in the health care system without the necessary materials. Anyway, it was a great experience and I am hoping to some day come back and get more experiences as everyone in the hospital was lots of fun and were great to chat with.
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| 2nd Sanitation Day |
Clean Ngara program
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| The community hard at work |
Now I just wanted to give you an update to the Clean Ngara project. Yesterday, we had our second Sanitation Day in Ngara, where we came together to clean the communitz areas. The turn up was very good as about 100 people came to clean up. The chief of the region came as well and looked at the dedication and work his community is doing. He was very much impressed. He also told me that the village close to us has also started implementing this program with him introducing it there. It was decided upon by the community that the amount of times we should have the Sanitation Day should be increased and so it was decided the on the 8th and on the 22nd of every month, we will be having Sanitation Day. For me as the initiator of this project i am pleased to see that the community is responding so well as they see the need for more days of cleaning and therefore have requested for a second date to be considered. As well, the community showed initiative as they said one area they want to clean at a different time so that the people working now can look at areas which need more work to make it clean. In general, this is very good development of the project and allows me to be happy about the progress.
Thanks for checking in and reading my Blog.
Tim
